An augmented reality (AR) display, which allows overlaying 2D or 3D digital information on a person's real-world view, has long been portrayed as a transformative technology to redefine the way we perceive and interact with digital information. Although several types of AR display devices have been explored, a desired form of AR displays is a lightweight optical see-through head-mounted display (OST-HMD), which enables optical superposition of digital information onto the direct view of the physical world and maintains see-through vision to the real world. With the rapidly increased bandwidth of wireless networks, the miniaturization of electronics, and the prevailing cloud computing, one of the current challenges is to realize an unobtrusive AR display that integrates the functions of OST-HMDs, smart phones, and mobile computing within the volume of a pair of eyeglasses.
Such an AR display, if available, will have the potential to revolutionize many fields of practice and penetrate through the fabric of life, including medical, defense and security, manufacturing, transportation, education and entertainment fields. For example, in medicine AR technology may enable a physician to see CT images of a patient superimposed onto the patient's abdomen while performing surgery; in mobile computing it can allow a tourist to access reviews of restaurants in his or her sight while walking on the street; in military training it can allow fighters to be effectively trained in environments that blend 3D virtual objects into live training environments.
Typically, the most critical barriers of AR technology are defined by the displays. The lack of high-performance, compact and low-cost AR displays limits the ability to explore the full range of benefits potentially offered by AR technology. In recent years a significant research and market drive has been toward overcoming the cumbersome, helmet-like form factor of OST-HMD systems, primarily focusing on achieving compact and lightweight form factors. Several optical technologies have been explored, resulting in significant advances in OST-HMDs. For instance, the well-advertised Google Glass® is a very compact, lightweight (˜36 grams), monocular OST-HMD, providing the benefits of encumbrance-free instant access to digital information. Although it has demonstrated a promising and exciting future prospect of AR displays, the current version of Google Glass® has a very narrow FOV (approximately 15° FOV diagonally) with an image resolution of 640×360 pixels. It offers limited ability to effectively augment the real-world view in many applications.
Despite such promises a number of problems remain with existing OST-HMD's, such as visual discomfort of AR displays. Thus, it would be an advance in the art to provide OST-HMD's which provide increased visual comfort, while achieving low-cost, high-performance, lightweight, and true 3D OST-HMD systems.